The present invention relates to a feeder for machines for wrapping small- and medium-size products, particularly confectionery products.
Conventional machines for wrapping products of the above-mentioned kind have a disk-like feeder and a wrapping head which rotate respectively about a vertical axis and a horizontal axis.
The individual products are received by respective recesses which are open upward and distributed along the peripheral region of the horizontal disk. In each instance, the product of a recess is transferred into one of the grippers of the head together with the piece of material in sheet form which is handled in the head and is meant to wrap and enclose the product.
The product is transferred in a corresponding station by an extractor which, with a rising stroke, passes through a hole of the bottom of the recess, crosses the horizontal disk from below, and lifts the product off it up to the corresponding gripper of the wrapping head.
With a descending stroke, the extractor then ceases to intersect the horizontal disk, leaving it free to rotate so that a new recess with the product moves into the transfer station.
In some conventional wrapping machines, slowness in operation caused by the alternating vertical strokes of the extractor is handled by making the extractor also perform simultaneous horizontal alternating strokes which follow the path of the recesses, respectively advancing with them and then retracting with respect to them.
Also due to such feeders, it has been necessary to provide wrapping machines with kinematic chains having variously orientated shafts, which have made such machines bulky and complicated and hinder access to the various actuation elements.
Moreover, the operating times of a feeder with disk and vertical extractor do not fit in well with those of the device that delivers the piece of material in sheet form to it, thus negatively affecting the productivity of the wrapping machine.